the lodging house they seemed never to have
heard of the undiminished heaps of splendour that lay piled behind plate
glass and polished counters. It was extraordinary, incredible, that he
wasn't to have the least of them.

As the winter closed in on him, the restrictions of daily living rose so
thick upon him that they began to prevent him from his dreams. He could
no longer get through them to the House with the Shining Walls. Often as
he lay in his bed trying to believe he was warm enough, he would set off
for it down the lanes of blinding city light through which the scream of
the trolley pursued him, only to see it glimmer palely on him through
impenetrable plate glass, or defended from him by huge trespass signs
that appeared to have some relation to the fact that he was not yet so
rich as he expected to be. Times when he would wake out of his sleep,
it would be to a strange sense of severances and loss, and though he did
not know exactly what ailed him, it was the loss of all his dreams.
After a while the whole city seemed to ache with that loss. He would lie
in his narrow bed and think that if he did not see his mother and
Bloombury again he would probably die of it.

Then along in the beginning of April somebody saw him. It was in the
dusk between supper and bed time, walking on the viaduct where he had
the park below him. There was a wash of blue still in the sky and a thin
blade of a moon tinging it with citron; here and there the light
glittered on the trickle of sap on the chafed boughs. It was just here
that he met her. She was about his own age, and she was walking oddly,
as though unconscious of the city all about her, with short picked
steps, and her hat with the tilt to it of a girl who knows herself
admired. She had a rose at her breast which she straightened now and
then, or smoothed a fold of her dress and hummed as she walked. Her
cheeks were bright even in the dusk, and some strange, quick fear kept
pace with her glancing. Peter was walking heavily himself, as the young
do when the dreams have gone out of them, and as they passed in the
light of the arc that danced delicately to the wandering air, the girl's
look skimmed him like a swallow. She must have turned just behind him,
for in a moment she drifted past his shoulder.

"Hello!" she said.

"Hello!" said Peter, but, in the moment it had taken to drag that up
from under his astonishment, she had passed him; her laugh as she went
brushed the